Erik Stayton

Current Projects

Research on Automation Engineering Paradigms

Fall 2015 - Now

Currently researching the design and
development of automated systems, especially automated cars,
in continuation of my thesis work. There are multiple
possible paradigms for these systems, from "complete"
autonomy (which is a practical impossibility, and which might
not even be useful or helpful if it were possible) to
systems which must be fully and continuously monitored by someone in
the driver's seat (also implausible for reasons of human
attention and response times). But there are alternatives
to these pictures that are not so often discussed, but
provide greater promise for real systems architectures:
backup systems like Auto-GCAS (in aviation); hybrid
human-machine systems built with adaptive automation
techniques; new types of infrastructures that solve
problems in automation as well as benefitting urban
architectures. I am investigating how these concepts can be
transformed into guiding principles, standards, or
regulation in order to foster the creation of automated vehicle systems
that solve social problems, rather than systems that simply
automate already problematic aspects of our transportation infrastructures.

Development of Tools for Distributed Open Science and
Scholarship

Spring 2013 - Now

Currently working on developing several tools for open,
distributed knowledge development for scientists and public
intellectuals. For too long has static text, with
occasional selected figures, been the standard for
scholarship in both the humanities and sciences. Even the
use of multimedia, afforded by online public
intellectual engagement by scholars and scientists, has
been limited, and has not radically changed the way that
people interact with knowledge. Current research with
Cinnamon Bird focuses on Chancery, which will be a
distributed, web-accessible, collaborative knowledge-base
written in Pharo (Smalltalk), and focused around the ability
to create ad-hoc visualizations for the investigation of
scholarly questions.

Past Work

Driverless Dreams: Technological
Narratives and the Shape of the Automated Car

Spring 2015

My completed Masters thesis at
MIT Comparative Media Studies, on
the history of automated car technologies, their social and
cultural implications, and the stakes of different modes of
human-machine interaction in the future of
transportation:

Automated cars, popularly
rendered as “driverless” or “self-driving” cars,
are a major sector of technological development in
artificial intelligence and present a variety of
questions for design, policy, and the culture at large. This
work addresses the dominant narratives and ideologies around
self-driving vehicles and their historical
antecedents, examining both the media’s representation of
self-driving vehicles and the sources of the idea, common
both among the media and many self-driving vehicle
researchers, that complete vehicle autonomy is the most
valuable future vision, or even the only one worth
discussing and investigating. This popular story
has important social stakes (including surveillance,
responsibility, and access), embedded in the
technologies and fields involved in visions of full
automation (machine vision, mapping, algorithmic ethics),
which bear investigating for the possible futures
of automation that they present. However, other paradigms
for automation exist, representing lenses from
literature in the fields of human supervisory
control and joint-cognitive systems design. These
fields—compared with that of AI—provide a very
different read on what automation means and where it is
headed in the future, which leads to the
possibility of different futures, with different
stakes and trade-offs. The work examines how automation
taxonomies, such as that by the NHTSA, fail to
account for these possibilities. Finally, this work examines
what cultural understandings need to change to
make this (cyborg) picture more broadly
comprehensible, and suggests potential impacts for policy
and future technological development. It argues
that a broader appreciation for our hybrid engagements with
machines, and recognition that automation alone does not
solve any social problems, can alter public
opinion and policy in productive ways, away from focus on
“autonomous” robots divorced from human agency, and toward
system-level joint human-machine designs that
address societal needs.

Research Assistant at The Trope Tank

Fall 2013 - Spring 2015

While completing my S.M. at MIT, I
worked as a research assistant at the
Trope Tank on a variety of
computing-related projects. The Trope Tank is a creative
computing laboratory, housing a variety of hardware and
software through which researchers engage with the material
history of computing. While at the Trope Tank I worked on
the Slant project, a narrative generation
system generated in collaboration with Fox Harrell at MIT
and Rafael Pérez y Pérez at UAM-Cuajimalpa. I also worked on
some material computing outreach at the MIT Museum and
online (e.g. a
comparison of the Apple IIe and
Commodore 64 graphical capabilities and control schemes).

Conference Presentation on Self-Driving
Cars as Technologies of Knowing

October 2014

Presented at the
Technologies of Knowing conference in Los Angeles, hosted by
the USC School of Cinematic Arts, October 24-25, 2014.
Autonomous vehicles depend upon, create, and transmit
representations of knowledge: knowledge about users, goals,
outcomes, and the physical world. But there is a paradox at
the heart of modern media and information technologies:
that software must simultaneously know and not know, and
companies (such as Google, with the right-to-be-forgotten
case) must strive not to see the very things that allow
their systems to operate. This ideology of information
gathering is rooted in the fields that have come together
to create self-driving vehicles: artificial intelligence,
computer vision, GIS and mapping, and statistical science.
So how must we understand our coming transportational
interlocutors? Through a consideration of the hidden
ideologies of autonomous vehicle research, I explore this
question and its opposite: through what processes and to
what ends will these systems and the companies that run
them "know" or encode us, as users giving commands,
passengers, pedestrians, and fellow drivers?

Conference Presentation on Narrator's Expectations in Slant

June 2014

Presented at the
Intelligent Narrative Technologies workshop in Milwaukee,
June 17-18, 2014. I presented with Nick Montfort
about modeling and expressing the narrator's expectations in
narrative generation with the Slant system. Much of the
scholarship about expectation centers on the reader's
expectations and how to use them to create surprise or
suspense in a story. However, we are interested in how the
narrator of a computational story expresses his or her
expectations for the narrative. Building on Deborah
Tannen's work on the expression of expectations, we
demonstrate our implementation of several techniques
(including omission, repetition, hedges, false-starts,
contrastive connectives, and explicit markers of surprise) and
how they enrich stories generated by the Slant system. We
also discuss how a narrator's characteristics (such as
irony and ability-to-be-surprised) can be productively
modeled to produce more interesting outputs.

Conference Presentation on Digital Editions

June 2014

Presented at the
Electronic Literature Organization conference in Milwaukee,
June 19-21, 2014. The talk was titled "Reditions (Editions,
Ports, Remakes and Beyond) of First Screening
and Karateka." Computational works often look very
different than the texts scholarly editors are used to
considering. Even basic questions of nomenclature, although
addressed in certain ways, are difficult to settle: How
should we name, and therefore understand, the basic textual
relationships for computational work? We introduce a new
term, "redition," in the context of two different computational works
and their follow-up versions. While those engaged
exclusively in literary studies would not consider
Karateka, and those looking at games exclusively would
not consider First Screening, we choose to reunite these
two 1984 Apple II programs, both of which have been carried
into new versions with great care. A Trope Tank tech report
on the topic will be co-authored by Nick Montfort.

Conference Panel on Educational Game Design

March 2014

Presented at a conference panel at the
Digital Media and Learning Conference, March 6-8, 2014 in
Boston, Massachusetts, with Chelsea Barabas, Desi Gonzalez,
and Jesse Sell. The panel was titled "Learning Where
You Least Expect It: Games that Educate in Non-traditional
Settings" and focused on appropriate game design and
assessment techniques for integrating games into the
classroom. While games provide new means of engagement with
material, educators (and industry professionals) often have
difficulty integrating play with learning goals and
assessing results. Erik Stayton applied his background
as an instructional designer to discuss learning assessment
for informal games, and suggest appropriate ways to measure
the impact of games in education.

cbGrocery Food Analytics Toolkit

May 2012 - February 2013

The current system of food labeling, a standardized label
including recommended daily intakes, descends from a World
War II effort to ensure that the food supply met the needs
of the average person. Nutrition science has since
advanced, and both changes to RDIs and calls for a new
label format have occurred, but a paper label is still a
label and will never be as informative as the phones and
devices many of us carry in our pockets. cbGrocery, short
for Cinnamon Bird Grocery is an innovative tool for
creating shopping lists, based around the concept of
identifying nutrient deficits in your shopping cart and
providing suggestions to correct those deficiencies before
you even enter the store. The cbGrocery project would also
like to track long-term food purchasing trends to examine
nutrient deficits over time. While the project is
currently pre-alpha, and in use by a few testers,
development has paused as we pursue CBV and EMP.

Project:Lifeline Disaster Relief Facebook
Application

August 2011 - June 2012

When a friend or family member goes missing in a
disaster, locating them is the first step to offering
support. And even though we are surrounded by
social media networks, repeated misinformation or
"telephone" effects can hobble their use in ascertaining the
status of a particular person. In August of 2011, the
Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response at HHS, in
conjunction with Health 2.0, challenged developers to
address this lack through the development of a Facebook app.
Cinnamon Bird's entrant, Project: Lifeline, won first place
in the challenge. The central concept of the project was to
provide a unified interface with which to view the wellbeing
of all your friends. When you install the app, you designate
"lifelines," such as spouses, parents, children, or friends,
who you trust to update the public interface with your status in
case you are unable to do so. The application thereby
provides a trusted information board that can be used to
crowdsource the search for missing persons.

Design and Programming

2004 - Now

Has been a graphic designer and programmer since 2004,
starting with web programming in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript,
adding on Python for scientific computing work at Brown
University as an undergraduate, and moving into Clojure,
Prolog, and Racket for Cinnamon Bird projects.

Writing, Editing, and Instructional Design

2007 - 2013

Performed writing, editing, quality assurance and
instructional design work for a variety of publishers and
publishing subcontractors including nSight Inc.,
DiacriTech, and Chameleon Publishing. Worked on multiple
projects as a subcontractor for large publishing companies
including Pearson, and higher-educational institutions
including Northern Arizona University.

About Me

I am a technologist and technology
scholar interested in shaping the future of human
relationships to technology by studying and critiquing
their past, their present, and conventionally accepted
visions of their future. I am currently focusing on
automated vehicle technologies---the ways they have been
primarily envisioned by prominent developers and the
media, and the often unacknowledged complexity and
hybridity of automated systems---arguing that only an eye
toward the design of the whole system, humans and machines
in the context of broader social goals, will reliably
produce vehicles that live up to our driverless dreams.
More broadly, I examine human relationships to everyday
automation technologies, the ideologies that drive and
support automation R&D, and the lived experience of human
agents in these interactions. I am also interested in the
intersection of human technological augmentation with
issues of privacy, property, control, and equitable
access. I am a developer with the programming partnership
Cinnamon Bird, and a graduate student at MIT, pursuing
a
Ph.D. with MIT
HASTS.

I am from Massachusetts, and got my dual-degree Sc.B. from Brown
University in physics and English literature, and my S.M.
from MIT Comparative Media
Studies. I play
guitar, and enjoy mountain biking, archery, iaido, and
swing dance. I am also a gearhead, gamer, and
sci-fi/fantasy nerd.